My second all grain is chugging away nicely, only thing is that it has been 6 days since fermentation started, and the SG is only 1020 (OG 1050). I am using 1056 American Ale, fermenting @18C. This is the longest primary I have ever experienced. The dried yeast always finished at 1008-1012 in 4 days tops. Is this something I will have to get used to when experimenting with different strains? Oh yeah, the beer still has a great head of foam on it, so I will take that to mean fermentation is still happening.

PS. This batch has none of the harsh flavours my other batch has, in fact, this preliminary sample I took was !@#$ good. All grain #3 is coming up this weekend!

I think you are right on target.
I don't want to confuse you but I want to mention something that I have done that really works out well.

Before the foam falls back into the beer as the fermention slows, I drain the beer to the secondary from my plastic bucket fermenter leaving the top and bottom junk behind. I believe it is referred to as "dropping" the beer.
Talk about smoooooth flavor.

1056 is a highly attenuative strain, so if you aerated enough and had a lot of viable cells at pitching you will hit your target gravity. If the krausen is still on the top of the fermenting wort, that's a sure sign that Ol' Chico is still hard at work.

I have actually had to increase my mash temperature slightly to favor more non-fermentable dextrines when I use 1056. FGs that were supposed to be around 1.012-1.014 kept ending up @1.009. Maybe a i should use some dextrine malt in the grist to keep the body at appropriate levels.

An all-grain batch a week - wow, what a pace! I think it's safe to say you have been bitten by the brew bug.

I also used to be an advocate of racking just before the krausen falls. but I kept running into literature that put the onset of yeast autolysis at @14 days, and finally decided that the extra benefits of letting the beer sit on the yeast bed - reabsorption of excess diacetyl, etc., was worth extending the time in the primary vessel.

Like all of this stuff, I say stick with what works for you - 10 homebrewers in a room will have 10 different solutions for any given situation - ain't it great?

Yeast autolysis onset can actually vary a good bit due to environmental and health factors. 14 days is somewhat of a good guideline, but not always the case. Alcohol content and higher fermentation temperatures greatly accelerate the onset of yeast autolysis.

Both at home and the brewery, I rack from the primary/bleed off from the conical the remaining trub on most batches within 4~6 days, which is a widely used practice among my collegues as well.

At the brewery I bleed off all accumulated matter within 12 hours of pitching from the bottom of the fermenter which is mostly protein (results from kettle fining) and hop matter ( in regards to both: read TANNINS !) and low viability to non-viable yeast. If you are able to, this is good to do at home as well. Rack from the initial primary to another sanitized one, but do so calmly to avoid any additional oxygen pickup. The yeast will have already gotten all the O2 they needed by then. This practice, when properly done, will improve the beer via a cleaner flavor and quicker conditioning.

It is a good practice to rack in the manner as Freon suggests because the majority of the viable yeast is still in solution, not in the trub at the bottom of the fermenter. To boot... you are removing the hop matter and protein from the picture which contains the highest proportion of the bacteria in the primary. The vast majority of diacetyl reabsorption takes place in the last ~4 degrees of gravity drop and is mostly performed by the active, flocculating yeast that at that time is in suspension, not the yeast entrained in the trub. This is because of access to more surface area within the beer as opposed to the thin layer that is in contact with the beer at the bottom of the fermenter, some of which is covered and mixed with trub.

Eric, reading your posts is like a poor-man's version of a Siebel course! Very much appreciated.

I do rack the wort off all that cold break material 8-12 hrs after pitching, and that certainly makes a difference in the finished beer. And I normally ferment at 64-68F unless a style calls for a warmer environment, so maybe my yeast doesn't go cannibal on me. The alcohol content issue is a concern, though, so this is good food for thought.

I think the "let it ride" approach to extended primary for me is largely the desire to not have to rack an extra time before finishing. When I get me one of them sweet conicals I'm sure I'll be back to getting the bulk of the settled yeast away from the beer because it will be a simpler task.

On that subject, I have been considering the Fermentap poor-man's inverted carboy solution for some time. But, the inversion of 40-50 lbs of liquid in a cumbersome and breakable vessel has me a little concerned. Anyone out there with first-hand experience with tehse systems care to chime in?

Can I get a witness, y'all! It's pure alchemy, and certainly the best way I know to connect with a few thousand years' culture and continuity.

When I tell non-beer people that human civilization is most likely teh byproduct of the desire for beer, and not teh other way around, they just kind of roll their eyes. Oh well, some folks grok it and some don't.

Just so happens I used a number of them whan they were released ~1994 or so. I posted on this topic a good while ago when this device came up, but I couldn't find it again.... so this will have to do:

They work very well, I never broke a carboy using them and they make transfers VERY easy with little to no O2 pickup. You can even use them to purge O2 from the next vessel by attaching the vent tube of the fermenting beer to another fermentap's vent tube in an empty carboy ! Then there are the obvious benefits of trub blowdown and yeast harvesting.

Now... the bad news. The vent tube is made by using one of those brittle racking canes. The fitting that is goes through is quite tight and I broke alot of tubes trying to get them in. I solved this problem by replacing the racking canes with stainless steel tubing of the same diameter.

The next problem never goes away... the valve assembly is made of nylon with multi-part nylon compression fittings and a solid ferrule that serves as a gasket. You have to take all this stuff apart to clean and sanitize it and put it back together without contaminating it. This proved difficult, but not impossible, and was time consuming. I basically got tired of labor involved and have not used them since.

Another problem is inverting a full carboy onto the halo stand. I eventually worked out a safe way to do this... but it has been long enough ago, I can't remember what I did ! (CRS Syndrome !!!)

I did eventually begin to autoclave the fittings looking at the fact that I had spent all that time to dismantle the assembly, so I thought I might as well hedge my bets against re-contamination upon reassembly by starting with sterility, not sanitization.

There is a compression fitting with a hole in the base of the Fermentap valve assembly through which you push a bent plastic racking cane. This cane goes all the way through the wort and into the headspace, which is the bottom of the carboy since it is inverted. There is a small nylon strainer that is placed on top of the cane so that hop matter cannot clog it, especially when using whole hops. The CO2 from the fermenting beer exits from the head space, travels down the tube and out the end of the racking cane.

This is about as easy as I can describe it. It is sort of hard to visualize this if you haven't seen a Fermentap before. I hope this answered your question in an understandable fasion.

I'll be permanently in Evansville this Saturday & start re-arranging the brewery on Monday. First brew is on Friday... an eech... Light Lager. Next up is an Ordinary Bitter followed by a hop snortin' IPA named Blue Eyed Moose ! By then I hope to have my Roskamp mill installed so I can order a bunch of un-milled grain. I'll give you some serving dates as soon as I know them.